elcome to Jenna Coleman Online, your best source for everything on the Blackpool born actress Jenna Coleman. She's best known for her role as Clara Oswald in Doctor Who, but she's now our fierce Queen Victoria in the ITV hit Victoria.

The site aim is to update you with all the latest news, photos and media concerning Jenna's career. Take a look around and enjoy your stay! If you have any questions, concerns or comments, then do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

Season three will begin in 1848, a “hugely dramatic and eventful” time for the royals as revolutions across Europe created uncertainty around the monarchy.

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ROLLACOASTER – Allow me to introduce the “impossible girl”. She’s visited hundreds of galaxies with a Time Lord and ruled the British Empire, dealt with dukes and Daleks (I’ll leave you to decide which are worse), but right now the most impossible thing she’s facing is trying to find somewhere to chat to me on the phone without cracking up the people around her. “Sorry!” She laughs when we finally connect. “You just caught me in the car with my driver and I knew he’d just giggle at everything I’m saying!”

Of course, the girl in question is Jenna Coleman, who obtained the tagline from her role as the Eleventh Doctor’s companion in the beloved BBC series Doctor Who. Accompanying both Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, Jenna rose to fame as Clara Oswald, the witty school teacher with the ability to charm alien life forms in numerous universes.

The chance to escape to different world’s has always appealed to Jenna and exploring alternate realities is what first made her want to get into acting. “I remember reading Enid Blyton and loads of books and their worlds becoming very vivid in my head,” she recalls. “I just remember being really, really young and for some reason it always just felt very simple. Acting was always what I wanted to do, it was more the ‘how’ that was always the more complicated thing.”

Putting in the hard work to make the “how” happen, Jenna scored her first role in Emmerdale in 2005, before getting the coveted companion role in 2012. Stepping into such a popular fandom was initially quite intimidating, but Jenna has since established a legacy as one of the most loved of the Doctor’s partners (soz, Martha). “I’ve never done anything where you’re the only new cog in a very oiled machine,” she explains. “It’s like you’re literally the only newbie on your own, which is quite a strange thing. You kind of have to hop onto a train that’s already full-speed ahead.”

THE TELEGRAPH – Towards the end of the first episode of The Cry, the BBC drama sent to fill the gaping Sunday night chasm left by Bodyguard, Jenna Coleman’s character, Joanna – a mother suffering from postnatal depression whose baby son suddenly disappears – talks about what it is like having two faces: one to be scrutinised by the public, another that exists in private.

It is, of course, a terrible cliché for an interviewer to draw parallels between an actor and the character they are playing. But given our insatiable social-media-fuelled appetite for personal information (and the fact that Coleman has had her love life very publicly dissected), when I meet the 32-year-old in a London hotel, I feel vaguely justified in trying to do just that.

She smiles. “I guess there is that,” she says. “I mean, I can definitely associate with that sensation of feeling… exposed.” Coleman was once linked with Prince Harry after she was photographed talking to him at a polo match. She used to go out with Richard Madden, star of Bodyguard (yes, she watched it) and is now shacked up with Tom Hughes, who plays her on-screen husband in Victoria. So she knows a bit about having all eyes on her.

The twist in The Cry, Coleman points out, is that the mother, Joanna, hasn’t signed up for anything like that. “She is a primary school teacher, who is quite shy, who is having to go through these horrific circumstances with all of these cameras pointed at her.” She notes that in the novel on which the new four-part drama is based, by the Australian thriller writer Helen FitzGerald, Joanna describes “feeling like an animal in a zoo”.

We now live in a world where every facial expression, every move, gets interpreted – and often as something that it isn’t. Coleman asks if I have seen the Nosedive episode of Charlie Brooker’s science fiction series Black Mirror, in which people give each other star ratings after every interaction.

THE OBSERVER – The other day Jenna Coleman gave birth for the seventh time. “I feel like my year has been literally maternity bras and pregnancy bumps,” she says over a cup of tea in acafénear her home in north London. “It’s becoming a parody now.” Before you start to worry about the medical anomaly that is Coleman’s uterus, rest assured it was all for the cameras. In real life, the 32-year-old Coleman has yet to have children: “I don’t know if the time is now for me,” she says. Onscreen, however, she has been through a long phase of playing mothers.

She is in the middle of filming the third series of Victoria, the hit ITV drama scripted by Daisy Goodwin in which Coleman plays the titular queen, and “we’re up to the seventh child now, which is just ridiculous”. Victoria ultimately had nine so, she adds, “I’m not out of the woods yet.” And then there’s the forthcoming BBC psychological drama, The Cry, in which Coleman plays Joanna, a young mother in present-day Glasgow, struggling to adapt to the demands of her newborn. Coleman had to pretend to give birth for that as well, screaming and gripping on to the side of the hospital bed with bared teeth and a sweat-drenched face. It was very convincing, I say. “Oh was it?” Coleman asks. “Good.” In order to get into the zone before filming a labour scene, she listens to music by Mumford & Sons. “There’s something about the banjo,” she explains. “I just try to get up a lot of adrenaline and for some reason the banjo and the drums, I think, help. I don’t know…” Has Coleman ever met her fellow actor, Carey Mulligan, who is married to the band’s frontman, Marcus Mumford? “No! Can you imagine if I did and said: ‘Your husband helps my labour scenes?’”

It turns out that giving birth is only the start of the action in The Cry. The four-part series, adapted from the eponymous novel by Australian author Helen Fitzgerald, centres on a shocking tragedy that triggers Joanna’s psychological unravelling. In charting her mental disintegration, the drama seeks to expose the myths and unacknowledged truths of motherhood. It’s a compelling watch, but in a piece so focused on the complexities of being a parent, I wonder if Coleman ever worried about not having children herself. “Yeah. I spent a good first chunk of it just thinking they’d completely miscast – and why on earth me?” she replies. “I’m not a mother! I really kind of hit myself over the head with it. I felt there was obviously something I wouldn’t be able to capture. It was something so… well, primal that I haven’t literally experienced. And I’ve really struggled with that.” She emailed all her friends who had babies asking for insight, and received reams of information in return, “just the kind of day-to-day realities of what it is being a new mum…”

Today (April 27) is Jenna’s 32nd Birthday! And in 3 days it will also be the site’s birthday, 6 years online! To celebrate both occasions, since Jenna is not doing much at the moment due to The Cry filming, I’ve decided to share with her fans some exclusive outtakes of the portraits taken ad the Kensington Palace (London) back in 2016 while she was promoting the first season of Victoria!

Be sure to check them out in our gallery. And again, happy birthday Jenna!

THE TIMES – Jenna Coleman, who is about to resume playing our second-longest reigning monarch in a Christmas special of Victoria, once met our longest-reigning monarch — in front of the Tardis. It was during Coleman’s previous job, playing the Doctor’s sparky companion Clara Oswald in Doctor Who. The Queen was attending an event at the BBC and the Blackpool-born actress was in line to shake hands.

“She said, ‘What do you do?’ ” Coleman recalls with a grin. “I said, ‘I travel through time and space.’ And she said, ‘That sounds like fun.’ ”

Coleman, 31 in Earth years, is still travelling through time and space in Victoria — just a rather more narrow portion of it. There are clear parallels between the queen she has met and the one she has played since 2015 in the ITV series, she says. “Growing up on the job, being a symbol of endurance.” Like Elizabeth, Victoria knew what it was like to be “in and out of favour — you kind of take it for granted that it was a stable time, but it really wasn’t.”

Sipping herbal tea in the restaurant of a hotel in Kensington, central London, Coleman is tiny, pretty and porcelain-skinned in grey sweater and chic black dungarees. Combine her luminosity with a wit and earthy zest that she honed in soap operas and you have a very different kind of Victoria from the dumpy matriarch of popular perception.

“People just don’t know the younger person at all,” she says in a voice that still has its Lancastrian twinkle. “The only photographic images we have of her are when she’s older. It’s hard to connect those with her younger self, full of life and romantic.” There’s also much Saxe-Coburg sexiness in this Victoria’s relationship with Albert (Tom Hughes). Like The Crown — the more highbrow Netflix series about Elizabeth II, which Coleman “inhaled in a weekend” — this show has given us a hot young royal couple who shag each other. The difference is that Coleman is also with the dashing Hughes in real life.

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